SOURCE: Potts, Stephen. “The Many Faces of the Hero in The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore 17, no. 4 (summer 1991): 4-11.

In the following essay, Potts delineates the various “hero cycles” and applies them to The Lord of the Rings.

Virtually countless are the heroes available to the student of mythology and mythic fantasy, and all but countless the studies and theories attempting to interpret these heroes. As long as mythic and fantastic tales have been seriously gathered and analyzed—that is, roughly since the Brothers Grimm published their Kinder-und Hausmärchen in the era of Napoleon—folklorists and mythographers have been struck by the many similarities among humanity's oldest stories and greatest heroes.

Today those of us who have wandered long in the lands of faerie, myth, and hero saga take such similarities for granted; the Hero, we know, is an archetype, or a collection of related archetypes. That...